1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a conveyor.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Very often throughout industry there is a requirement to convey objects around a factory and at some stage it is necessary to hold up the flow of objects without undue line pressure from following objects. This is often achieved by means of a series of free idling rollers mounted on shafts and connected at their shaft ends by two parallel chains driven by sprockets. When the object is stopped the idle rollers rotate backwards underneath the object.
Similarly there are many cases where objects are pushed sideways onto a moving or indexing conveyor at one point on its route, and are later removed sideways at another point. During the sideways motions the conveyor belt is subjected to lateral forces which tend to cause the conveyor belt to "track" out of true. There are many ways to overcome this problem, for example the belt can have a centre deep profile running in a track to resist sideways forces.
There are also many cases where it is necessary to separate objects, which are queuing nose to tail on a conveyor, e.g. in order to count them by photo electric detectors. This can be achieved by taking a typical idle roller conveyor as described above and contacting the underside of the idle rollers by a static plate. This will cause the idle rollers to rotate forwardly so that each object is accelerated in turn to twice the speed of the conveyor itself thereby achieving separation.